That would be even better and make more sense in a way. I just was amazed that everyone said Yes on the resolution even when the civic is virtually useless, maybe the AI doesn't have a proper evaluation of the civic proposed?
Suggestions and Requests
- Thread starter Leoreth
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That would be even better and make more sense in a way. I just was amazed that everyone said Yes on the resolution even when the civic is virtually useless, maybe the AI doesn't have a proper evaluation of the civic proposed?
Genghis Khaiser
King
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World Congress, for example.
Publicola
King
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I was thinking more about those silver mines around Athens, and I remembered something: ancient mining was f***ing miserable. Nowadays we have all kinds of equipment and machinery to make it more efficient, but back when silver and copper and iron were first discovered, extracting them was back-breaking work. Literally, I mean. The death toll was ridiculous. The mines around Athens were manned entirely by slaves, so they didn't keep records of how many dead bodies piled up, but they did keep records of how often they had to bring new slaves to replace the old ones. We also know how the people of Athens thought about the mines, because there are various legal cases and theater plays that refer to slave-masters threatening their bed-slaves with being sent to the mines if they weren't pleasing enough.
Yeah. Being sent to the mines was literally considered worse than being repeatedly raped.
All that to say: would it be possible to incorporate this aspect of the ancient world into the 'Slavery' civic? I know we already have the +1
for plantations, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the use of slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South. But would it be possible for Slavery to also provide +1 
for mines? Perhaps this bonus could obsolete with a early medieval tech, so the benefit would only apply to the ancient & classical eras? There was a fairly sharp decline in iron and other mining during the Middle Ages, partly because medieval European societies had lost the centralized administration to enforce a massive slave economy (though also in part because the medieval Church was opposed to slavery) which gave rise to new technology that made slavery unnecessary (first in agriculture, than in other sectors of the economy).
Yeah. Being sent to the mines was literally considered worse than being repeatedly raped.
All that to say: would it be possible to incorporate this aspect of the ancient world into the 'Slavery' civic? I know we already have the +1
for plantations, based on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the use of slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South. But would it be possible for Slavery to also provide +1 for mines? Perhaps this bonus could obsolete with a early medieval tech, so the benefit would only apply to the ancient & classical eras? There was a fairly sharp decline in iron and other mining during the Middle Ages, partly because medieval European societies had lost the centralized administration to enforce a massive slave economy (though also in part because the medieval Church was opposed to slavery) which gave rise to new technology that made slavery unnecessary (first in agriculture, than in other sectors of the economy).
Genghis Khaiser
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Speaking of slavery, there should be something African civs can do with slaves. I played as Ethiopia and I stacked a lot of those with no idea what to do with them until I traded them to Europeans after the UHV.
Oblivionyx
Warlord
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Such as...?
1SDANi
The Fading Memory
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IIRC the Europeans started buying slaves from African nations after the Spanish Reconquista. Basically before selling to Europe, African nations sold slaves to the Islamic world, though said slaves were relatively treated far better.
Imperator Knoedel
Currently obsessed with The Owl House
Doesn't Slavery already yield +1 Commerce from Mines?
1SDANi
The Fading Memory
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I assumed the dude above knew that and was suggesting Slavery should buff Mines even more. Not a good change IMO, but I like the history lesson.
inthesomeday
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It would even further imbalance things against river valley civs and towards china
Publicola
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That is highly debatable. Sexual slavery comprised a majority share of the slave trade within the Islamic world: roughly two-thirds of all African slaves were female, and almost all of those were used for sex (and this fact was openly and explicitly accepted as such). Of the one-third that were male slaves, many were made eunuches specifically to serve as guards for the harems where the female slaves were imprisoned. Plantation slavery in the Americas was brutal and deadly, true, but most of the deaths were due to disease, which killed indiscriminately (look at the death rates for slave owners living on the same plantations -- the tropics were basically a death trap for all involved).
Agreed, and I have no idea what this would do to game balance. On the other hand, I'd like to find some way to represent the decline in industrial capability with the fall of the Roman Empire and its slave economy. Roman engineering was borderline mythic well into the Middle Ages, as Europe lost the ability to build works of comparable grandeur (that's why they 'repurposed' so many columns from ancient buildings, and why porphyry was such a status symbol). It shouldn't be permanent shift -- the Middle Ages was quick to develop new & better technology in remarkably short order -- but there was a decline in the early years of Late Antiquity.
One possibility would be to make this an alternate buff -- normal mines and mines on luxury resources would still give +1
, but mines on strategic resources like bronze or iron would give +1 instead.
1SDANi
The Fading Memory
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Didn't know that, neat. My source was a passing mention about it during Extra Credit's Extra History series on the Mali Empire so forgive me if I'm misremembering or they were wrong.
Any chance the early Turkic AI can be tweaked to invade NW India? The Hephthalites, who the Turks can kinda-sorta be said to cover, definitely ruled a big chunk of India, and I feel like it would be a good way to destabilize India a bit more from 3000 BC starts.
DC123456789
Deity
A bit for the future, but it probably makes more sense to have them be part as a general (and sorely missing) Eastern Iranian civ that encompasses everything from the Indo-Scythians to the Kushans to the Hephthalites, who all were all doing the same thing invading Afghanistan and India from the north and west.
Instead of a whole new civ, what about reworking the Mughals to start early and cover these civs? Then they can “become” the Ghorid Sultanate and follow the Mughals’ route when they convert to Islam.
This is also my preferred idea because the Mughals are kiiiinda lacking in their UHVs right now IMO
Maybe it’s just that Culture goals suck
(because I’m bad at them)
(also because the idea of lowering my science slider to invest in culture physically repels me)
Oblivionyx
Warlord
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let me just crash into this nicely coherent train of ideas with a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT thing..
a while ago i suggested negative and abysmal "wonders"..like the Berlin Wall/Iron Curtain, The Great Firewall of China, Stalinist Purges, The Killing Fields/Holodomor/Cultural Revolution, Fake News (Project Mockingbird), Industrial scale organ harvesting...(...)...and maybe (causing a declaration of war by all democratic governments upon completion) Auschwitz. It would only be possible to build these under certain civ slot choices (dictatorships with state party, ideology and so forth) making them more interesting for the human player to chose. as of now, if you chose democracy and capitalism, you just steam right through the game. i wanna be able to play a totalitarian hellhole with thought control and concentration camps (well, not really, but it would be a nice change of gameplay) AND free enterprise (like the PR China..which is trying hard right now to out-Orwell Black Mirror).
admittedly, that's all VERY grim and bleak...but history is no disney cartoon, and maybe this could be reflected by those horror "wonders". they should also be free to be built by any player and multiple times.
imagine: a civ turns fascist. builds a negative wonder. gets a boost...war happens. gov changes. democracy....the immersion this would bring!
so...again, i'd love your input on that. leo, you think this is too much? i am no coder, so you guys tell me if this is even feasible to implement.
The negative wonders would have to have very powerful effects to be worth building.
I have spoken about this before I think. And while it's easy to get into debates about degrees and whataboutisms when I say that, but there are certain events in history - and I am specifically talking about large scale state organised industrial genocide and ethnic cleansing here - that happened that could be represented but in my opinion could and should not be part of a game. My reasoning here comes down to the question of would you actually want to do these things as a player and if so why. If it's role play, why would you want to role play that. I cannot find any reasonable answer to this question that would make it a good idea for me to facilitate or worse, encourage that (wonders have ingame advantages, right?) in a game that I make.
(Just to be clear, I am not talking about you specifically here of course, and don't want to imply that's the spirit in which you made the suggestion.)
I know that you could muster an argument about moral equivalence with, I don't know, population rushing, Mongol massacres or the transatlantic slave trade, which are all reprehensible historical events that happened in history and are in the game. Please consider the good faith reasons why there is a difference here without requiring me to restate them.
I do want to make a distinction between some of the things you suggested though. For example, I could see something like the Great Firewall as a project, and I think we can all agree that it does not inhabit the same moral space as the holocaust.
(Just to be clear, I am not talking about you specifically here of course, and don't want to imply that's the spirit in which you made the suggestion.)
I know that you could muster an argument about moral equivalence with, I don't know, population rushing, Mongol massacres or the transatlantic slave trade, which are all reprehensible historical events that happened in history and are in the game. Please consider the good faith reasons why there is a difference here without requiring me to restate them.
I do want to make a distinction between some of the things you suggested though. For example, I could see something like the Great Firewall as a project, and I think we can all agree that it does not inhabit the same moral space as the holocaust.
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